Search Results for: who

Power-Greedy.

Men wished to rule the world, but one man stood in their way. Peter Duncan came from the planet Mattrain – but who was he? Was he human? If so, whence came his vastly superior intellect and technical knowledge? These were mysteries the Administration feared – because they could not find the answer to them. Too late they saw danger. For, by then, Peter Duncan had escaped and taken refuge in the Devastated Areas, from which he continued his fight to save the human race from final utter destruction. But then, he had a reason. Martha of the chestnut hair and striking beauty, who alone knew his secret and who taught him how to love.

An old woman who spends her days scrubbing the floors might be an unlikely damsel in distress, but Lord Dunsany proves once again his mastery of the fantastical. The Charwoman’s Shadow is a beautiful tale of a sorcerer’s apprentice who discovers his master’s nefarious usage of stolen shadows, and vows to save the charwoman from her slavery.

‘A Luis Mendoza story means superlative suspense’ Los Angeles Times

Lieutenant Luis Mendoza is beset by two insistent puzzlers: how does his team nail the pair who are staging hold-ups at the best restaurants in town? And who was responsible for the brutal murder of an elderly widow?

Will Mendoza’s famous hunches point him to the answers?

The gun straps to the inside of my leg with Velcro. It’s not the absolute zenith of fashion to do this anymore, but girls who wear theirs with leather straps and buckles aren’t serious: with Velcro you can get at the thing when you need it.

I also have a pink ammo belt. It’s heavy, but who said fashion was easy?’

In a mall like any other, a gang of teenage girls are suddenly caught up in a maelstrom of shopping and violence. But – as the designer bullets fly – it is not only their own lives they are fighting for. Unknown to them they are battling for the life of a man trapped in another place, in a different world, and with very different enemies.
He is a man they have never met, but who represents the future of the human race … or could destroy it.

INTO THIN AIR

“A porteur? Never heard of it.” Robert Prestin was just an ordinary aviation journalist who had never heard of such things as porteurs, nor of other dimensions that supplied jewels to the Earth, nor of the metamorphic Borgia-like countess who ran the show with the aid of her scarlet-scaled Thrugs. And certainly he had never heard of a Lombok vine that could grow faster than a man could run.

No, Robert Prestin was just an ordinary man who sometimes lost things. That is until he sat next to a beautiful girl on a plane headed for Rome – and lost her somewhere in mid-air! At that point he knew he had a lot to learn, because somehow he had – or was – the key to Irunium.

Arthur Hodgkiss – a master gem thief – is in London, about to realise his lifelong ambition to steal the Crown Jewels. But he is mistaken for Chinese agent, Kung Fu Tzu, and is unwittingly given a package containing stolen top secret government plans.

Enter British Intelligence who put their top man on the job: the suave, fearless ladies’ man, Jerry Cornell. There ensues a chaotic comedy of errors in which Jerry Cornell pursues Kung Fu Tzu, the titular Chinese agent, who is in turn pursuing Arthur Hodgkiss, who was given the secret plans for which Cornell is pursuing Kung Fu Tzu.



In this perfect circle of bluff and counter-bluff, the only one thing that is certain is that nothing can be known for sure.

When human genes go wild, reproduction can no longer be left to chance – and it is Robert Wellton, Chief of the Genetics Bureau, the most feared and hated man in the world, who decides who will mate with whom.
But nobody can tell Wellton whom to mate with! He alone knows that the Genetics Program is collapsing, for fewer Normals are found each yer – and his father, who had been Genetics Chief before him, had discovered that not all Deviates are nature’s failures. Some are telepathic and long-lived – like Robert Wellton himself.
Thus is born the plan that Adam Wellton conceived and that Robert Wellton carries on – the creation of a Secret People. Born of Normal mothers, they are all Wellton’s sons and daughters, bearing his improved genes – living hidden in a colony in the Canadian wilderness, protected from the hate and jealousy of civilization by Wellton, who stays in telepathic touch with them.
But disaster strikes when a bitter powerful committee, suspecting the existence of concealed Deviates, begins a relentless search for them. Wellton knows there can be only one result – he Secret People will be hunted down and wiped out!

For years the worldwide operations of a mysterious and ruthless extortioner who calls himself the Tortoise have baffled Scotland Yard and the police forces of Europe. But the Tortoise makes a mistake when he interferes with wealthy American playboy Don Micklem, who has friends in high places, and soon tracks him to his lair …

‘The thriller maestro of the generation’ Manchester Evening News

A crazed and dying Flight Lieutenant, nine village children, a top-secret spacecraft – all of them out of control and adrift in space! Someone must take charge. But who?

Brylo has the brains, but not the personality, so it is the powerful young bully Tony who sets himself up as Captain – and steers the ship and its cargo of children towards new and horrifying dangers…

Leni Neumann is rebuilding her life as a Jewish survivor in post-war Vienna, having lost her mother in a Nazi prison. As a singer going from café to café, she meets all kinds of people: good people, who want to leave the horrors of war behind; neurotics, who hope to restore days of perverse glory. Drawn by the splendid, strange new world in which she finds herself, Leni is easy prey for the forces that surround her.

Then she meets Gerhard, who offers her money, power, luxury and refinement, and Leni accepts his proposal. But Gerhard is a troubled man, and Leni finds herself forced to seek the truth about her marriage – a truth that may threaten her very life.

Other than her Uncle George, Sukie was the only member of the notorious Heap family who was still at large. Her great-grandfather, who had invented a particularly nasty machine gun, was immortalised in wax at Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. So was Sukie’s grandmother, who one day had taken an axe and disposed of five of her neighbours. Sukie’s mother later tried her hand at arson and was sent to a mental institution.

Sukie defiantly explained, as had her mother before her, that insanity did not run in the family. The Heaps were definitely being maligned. But, naturally, when Mr Bentley turned up dead with a bloody axe at his side, Sukie’s husband figured she was at last taking up the family trade

‘A charnel-house frolic’ The Spectator

Pip and Flinx: Book Thirteen.

“I know who your father is . . . Gestalt.”

A stunned Flinx hears these dying words from one of the renegade eugenicists whose experiments with humans twenty-odd years ago shocked the galaxy . . . and spawned Flinx. So Flinx and his minidrag, Pip, venture to Gestalt, an out-of-the-way planet that may supply the key to Flinx’s shadowy past and strange powers.

Unfortunately for Flinx, Gestalt also hosts a resident bounty hunter who’s just learned about the stupendous reward offered for a certain dead redhead. Flinx gets a chance to test his adversary’s skills when our hero’s skimmer is blasted out of the sky and into a raging river in the middle of nowhere – a nowhere of impassable terrain and ravenous, carnivorous beasts.

They were Thieves for Freedom.

The golden ring – a sacred object to the inhabitants of Janipur – was one of five. Together they were the key to control of the Master System and the only hope of humanity taking charge once more of its own destiny.

Hunted through the galaxy, the rebels’ chances of survival, let alone success, were desperately slim. The three had been transmuted into Janipurians – four-legged, hairy creatures – and had infiltrated the complex, ritualised society of this long-ago terraformed planet.

And with them was Vulture, the artificially created shapechanger who could become, in body and mind, any organic creature. Vulture it was who now watched the solemn ceremony as the ring was brought out and displayed to the crowd, who understood that not just the Master System but the whole population would be hunting down the stealers of the ring.

The sun shone brightly on this fateful morning, bringing to its planets warmth and life-giving rays. The brightness increased sharply as the morning grew older. The glare was blinding; the radiation not life-giving, but deadly. By mid-afternoon the brilliant, intense sun shone on barren space. It had blasted each of its four planets out of existence.

Someone had found a way to poison a star.

And someone had to be found who could prevent the takeover – or destruction – of the entire universe. Who? Johnny Kettrick, as improbable a hero there never was. Johnny Kettrick who was banned from the Cluster World for his not-too-honest dealings was sent back there with his three equally unholy partners to search out the Doomstar…to find the Doomstar before it burned out another world.

Griselda and Con Satterlee are spending a second honeymoon in a cottage on Long Beach, and it’s not going well. To cap it all, Con picks up a blonde in the Bamboo Bar one night and walks out with her, leaving Griselda on her own.

Con comes back, saying that he took the blonde outside to try to stop her from shooting herself, but the police find her body the next morning and Con is arrested for her murder.

Then Con disappears, and Griselda is alone in their beach house with a door that can’t keep out the Major, who frightens her; Kew, whom Con distrusts; Kathie, who is lovely, and so strange; or Dare, who has caused trouble before . . .

Griselda must work quickly to save Con – and their marriage.

First there was Della, the woman who wanted . . . love? She did not – could not – know, for where love should have been was emptiness.

Then came the Poet, who wanted only to please, but did not know how. His every effort was rejected – but he could not stop trying.

Rogers was the completion, the part above all other parts that made the whole.

And then there was Archer – and the thing in his brain . . .

John Crowley evokes, with absolute precision, the ordinary-and not so ordinary-moments that reflect and illuminate the essential nature of family life. Moving gracefully back and forth between the imaginary planet Brxx and our own familiar Earth, this deeply affecting tale examines the primal importance of stories, while challenging some of our most common misconceptions about those who are “different” and those who are not.

THE PHENOMENAL, SPELLBINDING WELL-WORLD SAGA

‘I was a beggar who became queen of beggars, a whore when I had to buy the stars I craved…’

Volume two finds Mavra Chang, who alone is able to protect the Universe from the archvillain Antor Trelig, exiled on the Well World. There she and Trelig face countless bizarre ecologies, locked in a desperate struggle for control of the Universe.

Dr Charles Gair was found hanged, but that is not what killed him. This was the first of the bizarre surprises awaiting those who penetrated the home of the head of the Martindale research establishment on a Sunday morning to see what was amiss.

Even more startling was the discovery of a second body, perfectly mummified . . .


‘The writer who may be the closest of all to Christie in style, plotting and general milieu’ Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Set sixteen years after the events of The Exiled Earthborn, this explosive conclusion of the Earthborn trilogy tells the story of two brothers, the sons of Lucas and Asha, tasked with surviving the Xalan war to ensure the continued existence of the human race.

Noah, an orphan from Earth’s last days who, as a child, was smuggled to safety across the stars, is now nearly a man and a leader to the young enclave of Earthborn who reside on Sora. When the tranquility of their settlement is shattered by a shocking assassination attempt, Noah turns to his combative younger brother Erik, Lucas and Asha’s only child by blood, for aid. Their journey takes them to the remnants of a dead planet, an outlaw-infested space station, and back to Sora, whose inhabitants are bracing for a final showdown with the bloodthirsty Xalans.

They find themselves facing a new evil: the omnipotent Archon, who is somehow controlling the whole of the Xalan horde, and his bloodthirsty lieutenant, the Black Corsair, who has an unmatched taste for brutality. The Archon, so-called God of the Shadows, has unearthed knowledge that could wipe both Sorans and humans alike from the face of existence. The descendants of the Earthborn must uncover the true nature of the Archon and the Xalans before he burns everything they know and love to ashes.

Richard, Robin and Nigel are ordinary boys who share a taste for the macabre in films, videos, books and comics. Then they admit a fourth member to their club – Toady, who is not at all an ordinary boy. From the moment he lures the boys to a seance, unimagined horror overtakes their lives.

“A strikingly imaginative mixture of horror and fantasy, with a real sense of supernatural terror and with scenes of horror so strange they border on surrealism.” Ramsey Campbell

Time and Chance is the autobiography of Hugo, World Fantasy and SFWA Grand Master Award-winning author, L. Sprague de Camp. It is a fascinating insight into a man who began writing in the late 1930’s and remained an active voice in the genre up until his death in the last year of the twentieth century, and who was a prime mover in the formation of the fields of Science Fiction and Fantasy as we know them today.

What! A science fiction novel about science fiction fans? And why not?

Or – like it says in this novel:

“Do you really think that a group of science fiction fans could save this planet? Could understand this situation to save it?”
“I most certainly do,” she says. “Who else?”

Who else, indeed?
Not since Frederic Brown’s “What Mad Universe” has there been a novel like this.

Lucas Hutchman is the Ground Zero Man

The man who has his finger on the button, the man who can destroy the world – or save it, the man whose own life suddenly has no value, unless he can make the governments of Earth understand that he is the absolute master of the ultimate doomsday device – a device that can trigger every nuclear weapon in existence if Hutchman’s demands are not met in time.